Ariel Kaminer on Mark Crispin Miller and the Drive for Electoral Integrity

In her recent New York Times profile of Mark Crispin Miller, a professor of media studies at NYU and a longtime contributor to Harper’s Magazine, Ariel Kaminer discusses Miller’s drive to promote electoral integrity, an effort she notes gained significant traction with the cover story he wrote for Harper’s in August 2005, “None Dare Call It Stolen.”

That traction, Kaminer argues, diminished with the publication of Fooled Again, Miller’s book on election reform. “Having previously established himself as a respected critic of television and advertising,” she writes, “Professor Miller became a lonely voice of doom, the Cassandra of the American electoral system.” Kaminer neglects to mention, however, that Miller based good portions of his work on Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio, a report by the Democratic staff of the House Judiciary Committee that found “numerous, serious election irregularities” affecting hundreds of thousands of votes in the presidential election of 2004. Readers familiar with that report, and with our December 2012 cover story, “How to Rig an Election,” by Victoria Collier, will be aware of the passel of other Cassandras keeping an eye on this country’s electoral system.

“He could be one of a million beach-bound, black-socked Florida retirees, not the man who, by some odd happenstance of life, possesses the brain of Albert Einstein — literally cut it out of the dead scientist's head.”